Life Together

Earlier this week, Lindsey and I took the kids on a bike ride from our house to the big playground near the YMCA. It has big, looming playscapes that make our already small children look smaller. One of the things I love about Abraham and Frankie is that in spite of their sizes, they’ve never shirked back from an opportunity to try to climb something just a little out of their reach. At the seminary, we had large, stone walls that surrounded one of the playgrounds on campus built into a hillside. Almost as soon as Abe could crawl, he was trying to scale the walls - and was successful far more quickly that I think Lindsey and I were anticipating. Which is why, I think his time on the playground recently was troubling. He set out to climb a particularly precarious Tyrannosaurs Rex head, and was failing, over and over again. Now, failure like that isn’t anything necessarily new to him - he just would get back up and try again. What was different this time was a group of older kids that he was trying to emulate as they climbed the dino skull with ease. They told him over and over again that he couldn’t do what they were doing. Eventually he came up to us, upset that the other children would tell him he couldn’t do something. He didn’t only lose the faith in the end goal, but it seemed to be enough to also have him lose faith in the process at all - he didn’t try to climb that T. Rex anymore.

God calls us to lives of faithfulness together - a long obedience in the same direction, as Eugene Peterson puts it. When the journey is calm and smooth, or when we have arrived at our destination, it’s easy to recognize God’s faithfulness - a Super Bowl victor giving thanks to God for God’s provenance, the lottery winner knowing it’s all about God, “Thank you for the Oscar,” says the actor, “And of course I need to give thanks to God, for with God all things are possible” - but it isn’t always the easiest path. We’re more often caught between an amorphous point A and B, in the midst of the heavily shadowed forests of life, visible-yet-overgrown paths guiding us as we journey. We can hear the gentle sounds of a walk through the woods, but there are also the foreboding sounds - the ones that tell us we should stay home; the journey of faithfulness is too hard. The journey of faithfulness is lonely. Who will join us as we go along?

In the lectionary passages today, we are invited along to witness snapshots of obedience and faithfulness, and I think help us get a sense of what we struggle with as we learn to serve God in the world. 

First, we struggle to perservere.In our Corinthians passage, Paul speaks of the weaknesses inside of him. I think we can commiserate with Paul here - here’s someone who had achieved so much, been so faithful to the task, but there are still struggles, still places of pain. It helps to know that the word that we traditionally translate as “thorns” is really more like a stake - driven into Paul. Scholars and theologians argue about what it may be - Calvin thought it might be spiritual temptation, Luther believe it may be the oppression Paul encountered, and still others like some of the early church fathers like St. Jerome thought it might be a physical pain like headaches or poor eyesight.[1] The range of possibilities reminds us that there are many ways we might have internal struggle. And perhaps the largest stake for us in modern society is loneliness. In May, Cigna (the insurance company) released the results of a study of 20,000 US adults age 18 and older using the highly respected UCLA Loneliness Scale. I’ll make sure to post a copy of the study online, but what it was telling about the stakes driven into us was incredibly memorable:

• Nearly half of Americans report sometimes or always feeling alone (46 percent) or left out (47 percent).
• One in four Americans (27 percent) rarely or never feel as though there are people who really understand them.
• Two in five Americans sometimes or always feel that their relationships are not meaningful (43 percent) and that they are isolated from others (43 percent).
• One in five people report they rarely or never feel close to people (20 percent) or feel like there are people they can talk to (18 percent).
• Only around half of Americans (53 percent) have meaningful in-person social interactions, such as having an extended conversation with a friend or spending quality time with family, on a daily basis.

And perhaps most discouraging is that the younger you are, the more likely you are to feel lonely - individuals who were 18-22 in the study said more often than anyone else that they felt left out, alone, and isolated from others. This kind of loneliness is more fatal than obesity - it’s on par with smoking 15 cigarettes a day. When faced with this kind of loneliness, how are we able to go on?

Second, we struggle to be heard.Ezekiel was a prophet set in an interesting in-between time of the Israelite people. He is a member of the exiled group in Babylon, and we hear his initial call by God to prophesy to the people of Israel - his cousins. And right from the beginning, we get this sense that things won’t be easy for Ezekiel. Folks aren’t going to be too excited for what he’ll say - the people are rebellious. Imprudent. Stubborn. Because of all of this, they may or may not hear you. Good luck, Ezekiel!

What a way to start your ministry - I imagine that would have been like Tim Jones saying to me in the charge to the pastor that I can preach until I’m blue in the face, this congregation won’t hear you. It would have been like Don saying in the charge to you all the congregation good luck working with this guy - you try to tell him something but he’ll be imprudent and stubborn… it would have made for an awkward piece of cake for sure.

If Ezekiel give us the before of the struggles of being heard, then Mark gives us the after. When we encounter the always-on-the-move Jesus and disciples in Mark, we get to witness a homecoming. He begins to teach, and one might be forgiven for thinking that the savior of the world in his hometown would get a reasonable response. But instead, he’s met with derision, primarily because what he taught - and this is pretty close to the literal Greek here - blew their minds. They were offended by him. They rejected him. The crucial message of Jesus Christ is ignored by the community; the question of “who does this guy think he is? How does he have the authority to say what he’s saying? Isn’t he just a carpenter’s kid?”

Doesn’t this sound reminiscent of the way that we approach our cousins in the Christian faith? We are all trying to navigate difficult passages in the midst of a complex society, bridging gaps amongst ever increasingly diverse groups of people, all beloved children of God. We are trying to understand what it is be stewards of God’s justice in the world, and our spirits are pulled in different directions - some folks towards social action, others towards environmental stewardship, while others try to express the need to be clear-eyed in Scripture. We try to speak the truth pulling on our Spirits to one other, but it seems that our reactions are of hard-heartedness to each other: one group questioning if the other are really Christian, each side using the name of Jesus for political sport - it’s far too easy to see all sides of Christian spectrum calling the other “fake Christians.” In the end we all become a little less like Ezekiel and Jesus and more like the hometown community. The constant pull and push of these discourses amongst the people who claim the same title of Christian as we do increases our inertia to the point where we withdraw and just stay put - neutrality and disengagement are the way to go. We abandon our walk in the deep woods to build hasty lean-tos, constantly having to defend them, repair them against every person who walks by, our energies spent on what we create and not on the faithful journey God has set us on. It’s a lot easier to say “who does this person think they are” than try to listen, and perhaps even more difficult still to speak truth into a world that doubts you.

When I wrapped up this part of the sermon, I have to be honest with you: I quit for a moment and thought about reworking the whole thing, because I wrestled with where the good news here was. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes with witnessing the difficulty of living faithfully, moving in that long obedience. Sometimes the lectionary doesn’t pull any punches. Sometimes our strength only becomes visible in our weakness.

And this is where the redemption comes, just as Paul realized - in each moment here today, we witness God’s faithfulness to God’s people. No matter the difficulties, in each of the passages today, God is still near - in the voice Ezekiel hears, in Paul’s weakness, and in the disciples healing, God is there. And in each of the moments where abandonment would have seemed like a reasonable option, each of the individual’s we talked about today just kept going. The paths darkened by the foreboding woods of doubt and hard-heartedness were illumined by the Spirit of God who asked nothing more than to continue in the same direction that they were going - Ezekiel, still prophesy; Paul, still persevere; Jesus, still teach, still heal.

Which leaves us finally with the disciples in Mark; a group of folks whose journey was similar to ours - follow Jesus where he goes. It might have been tempting for the disciples after watching their leader head home and apparently onlybe able to do a few healings of sick people that it’s time to disband, but Jesus instead invites them to keep going, and furthermore, to go together, two by two. Live faithfully, but do it together. Where you can serve, serve and remain. Where you are not heard by the hard-hearted, take nothing - not even the dust on your sandals - and continue to walk.[2] But don’t do it alone - don’t get caught in the snares of loneliness because the doubts of the journey will be even greater - loneliness and failure feel like such a lethal combination.

Friends, I imagine as some of you are sitting here today, you feel the burdens of living faithfully. You witness what’s happening in the world and it exhausts you. The walk feels more like a drag, feels more like a crawl, feels like not wanting to move at all. But just as sure as the disciples walked together, we walk together as well. In our assembly, we perform the liturgy - literally, the people’s work. We confess places where we’re broken and we forgive together. We share peace together. We are fed together. We learn together. We celebrate and we mourn together. And we are invited to these acts of faithful work not just on Sunday, but instead are invited to live these Sunday actions throughout our whole week. We walk on our path of faithful obedience to God together. The light of God that reflects on our path is made more bright as the Holy Spirit within each of us responds - we become lanterns for each other, encouraging the world to abandon the lean-tos of inertia and come along. When we are weak, we seek out each other and share the load, because we are not alone - we don’t stop each other from trying to climb, but we reach out a hand. This is the joy of faithful life together, with a God who is right amongst us, never having left us nor the other faithful Saints who shine lanterns throughout history and will for ages in the future. So let’s walk together: the journey is long, and can be hard, but I know that I’m so, so happy we walk side by side. Amen.

[1]   William Barclay noted this in his commentary.

[2]   I prefer this over thinking that this is some kind of negative remark. See http://leftbehindandlovingit.blogspot.com